@article {1479, title = {Suppressing the loss of ultracold molecules via the continuous quantum Zeno effect }, journal = {Physical Review Letters}, volume = {112}, year = {2014}, month = {2014/2/20}, abstract = { We investigate theoretically the suppression of two-body losses when the on-site loss rate is larger than all other energy scales in a lattice. This work quantitatively explains the recently observed suppression of chemical reactions between two rotational states of fermionic KRb molecules confined in one-dimensional tubes with a weak lattice along the tubes [Yan et al., Nature 501, 521-525 (2013)]. New loss rate measurements performed for different lattice parameters but under controlled initial conditions allow us to show that the loss suppression is a consequence of the combined effects of lattice confinement and the continuous quantum Zeno effect. A key finding, relevant for generic strongly reactive systems, is that while a single-band theory can qualitatively describe the data, a quantitative analysis must include multiband effects. Accounting for these effects reduces the inferred molecule filling fraction by a factor of five. A rate equation can describe much of the data, but to properly reproduce the loss dynamics with a fixed filling fraction for all lattice parameters we develop a mean-field model and benchmark it with numerically exact time-dependent density matrix renormalization group calculations. }, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.070404}, url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.2221v2}, author = {Bihui Zhu and Bryce Gadway and Michael Foss-Feig and Johannes Schachenmayer and Michael Wall and Kaden R. A. Hazzard and Bo Yan and Steven A. Moses and Jacob P. Covey and Deborah S. Jin and Jun Ye and Murray Holland and Ana Maria Rey} }